"The Company"

The dance sequences in "The Company" are among the most dazzling ever put on film. Altman and his cinematographer, Andrew Dunn, allow us to experience each performance from both sides of the footlights, to both watch the movement and be in it. The film opens with Alwin Nikolais' "Tensile Movement," in which the dancers move among ribbons strung out across the stage and then dance in perfect synchronization with large elastic bands framing their four splayed limbs, changing size and shape to correspond to their movements. The film ends with Robert Desrosiers' "Blue Snake," a silly, storybook extravaganza with bright colors that are pretty to look at, though the visual clutter tends to upstage the dancers.

It's a slight miscalculation because, dancewise, the movie reaches its peak midway through with the Lar Lubovitch pas de deux to Rodgers and Hart's "My Funny Valentine," played on piano and cello by Marvin Laird and Clay Ruede and danced by Neve Campbell and Joffrey dancer Domingo Rubio. I don't think it's too much to say that this is one of the most surpassingly romantic sequences ever put on film. Every cliché you've ever heard about dance being a metaphor for sublimated lovemaking might have been invented to talk about this scene.

To the accompaniment of what must be the most achingly melancholy of American standards (Altman uses different versions of the song throughout the movie, in somewhat the same way he used different versions of John Williams' theme in "The Long Goodbye"), Campbell and Rubio play out a scenario of seduction and rapture and heartache in movements that are as simple and suffused with feeling as Lorenz Hart's lyrics are. Dance, along with music and movies, is the most ephemeral of forms, and you can't help thinking of the longing that great vocalists have put into the line "Stay, little valentine, stay," as you watch the exquisite and all too fleeting beauty of this dance. Altman heightens the drama of this outdoor performance by adding the rumbling of a looming thunderstorm. It's as if God couldn't abide this moment of human perfection without adding His own complementary touch.

Altman gives this sequence the perfect coda, cutting between Rubio rehearsing alone in the studio and Campbell's Ry returning to her apartment and crying -- who knows why? Maybe because her moment of triumph is over. Whatever the reason is, Altman doesn't spell it out. What registers in the scene is seeing each dancer alone after the union they achieved onstage. The conception and editing of the sequence (by Geraldine Peroni) suggest the sequence in Jean Vigo's film "L'Atalante" where the separated newlyweds dream of embracing each other in their sleep.

Neve Campbell had previous dance experience and trained with the Joffrey for this role. She also wrote the film's story with Barbara Turner and is one of the producers. After her fine performances in "The Craft," "Wild Things" and "Panic," it shouldn't still be necessary to defend Campbell as an actress, but there are plenty of people, some of them critics, who still regard her as a "TV actress" or a teen idol. (You run into the same thing with Michelle Williams and Katie Holmes.) Campbell is no more the star here than anyone else (the title of the movie is, after all, "The Company").

She fits as beautifully into Altman's ensemble as she does among the Joffrey dancers. Her solo in "Blue Snake" is the one moment in the ballet where we're not distracted from the dancing by the design elements. Ry is the focus of the movie's preoccupation with the beauty of youth, and that particular look of Campbell's, her air of bruised expectancy, adds a touching element to the film's casual lightness. Altman doesn't use Ry, who works as a bartender in the off-season, to illustrate the difficulty of a dancer's life -- probably because at her age, having a crappy part-time job is part of what being an artist is all about. The bloom of youth is the same thing here as the bloom of creativity, the excitement of being on your own and making your own friends and choices.

There's a funny moment when a dancer who rents out space on the floor of her cramped apartment to other dancers who need places to crash goes creeping among the sleeping bodies in her living room, trying to solicit a spare condom. The lives of the dancers look pretty good to Altman, even with the disappointments and injuries, because they have the freedom to work. The struggles will come later; Altman lets them relish their ambition.

He's just as affectionate in his treatment of young love. Ry's involvement with Josh (James Franco), a young man she meets in a bar, is sketched in a series of seemingly tossed-off scenes that capture their comfortable intimacy. We don't see much more than the two of them watching TV or making breakfast or Ry coming home late from her bartending job to find Josh sacked out on the couch after preparing her a surprise New Year's Eve dinner. Here, as elsewhere in the movie, by showing us the textures of these lives instead of just the drama, Altman has made a very evocative movie. It's not until after you've seen it that the substance in the movie's lightness becomes apparent.

It's one of the mysteries of movies that directors sometimes express more of themselves and more of the themes that preoccupy them in what seems like their lightest movies. Howard Hawks never went deeper into the camaraderie of makeshift communities than he did in "Rio Bravo" and "Hatari!"; George Cukor gave the most polished demonstration of his casual elegance in "Pat and Mike"; Woody Allen finally made the serious comedy about love and death he had always wanted to in "Manhattan Murder Mystery."

"The Company" feels as light as those movies, even though it's the flip side to Altman's most turbulent film, "Vincent and Theo," which was about the agonies of the artist who defies commerce. "The Company" is about the glories of the artists who defy time. The dancers in "The Company" achieve what the racehorses in "Seabiscuit" failed to -- they express the astonishing poignancy of creatures whose strength and fragility are inseparable.

Altman, who has defied time more than any filmmaker can be expected to, is in total harmony with them. The measure of that harmony is in the recurring motif of the love affair between Campbell and Franco: The sight of the two of them mouthing to each other across crowded rooms. For a director who has always delighted in the babble of overlapping dialogue, it must have been a pleasure to find two characters who can communicate above the surrounding din.

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